I’ve recently been blogging about ESXi patches with the hopes of making it easier for you to identify and track available updates and to keep your ESXi hosts up-to-date. In my first post I talked about how to find patches. In my second post I went over the steps to manually upload the patches into Update Manager. The next topic I want to cover is how to install the patches using the vCLI. Fortunately, this is easily done because there are already a couple of good blog posts that show how to do this. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m just going to point to the existing articles.
Back in September 2010, shortly after we released our first ESXi 5.0 update I wrote this article giving an overview on how to use the new ESXCLI command released with vSphere 5.0 to install ESXi updates update.
More recently William Lam recently posted this excellent article that not only shows how to use the new ESXCLI command with ESXi 5.0, but also provides a good overview of the other available vCLI and PowerCLI commands that can be used to patch versions of ESX/ESXi prior to 5.0:
